The play “Be a Good Little Widow” was inspired in part by a morbid fear of plane crashes, Bekah Brunstetter was explaining over the phone one recent morning.

This particular recent morning happened to be the day before Brunstetter — whose play involves a newlywed dealing with the sudden death of her husband (you’ll never guess how) ­— was set to depart for a wedding. In London. And she wasn’t going by ocean liner.

“I’m not looking forward so much to the flight,” Brunstetter acknowledged, in a bit of chipper understatement. “I’m not in love with flying.”

Brunstetter went on to explain that she “kind of wrote the play to combat that anxiety. It had really been an anxiety for me. I tend to write about things that freak me out — try to figure out what’s going on in my head.”

OK, but would she maybe rather talk about a different subject, since she’d be winging six miles above the planet in a matter of hours?

“No, I’ll talk about it. See, the more I talk about it, the more ironic it would be if the plane crashed tomorrow. So it’s fine.”

(Spoiler alert: Brunstetter made it to London and back home to L.A. safely.)

Brunstetter’s fear of flying, by the way, has gotten better since she started writing “Be a Good Little Widow” several years ago — partly because “I have to fly a lot more now. At a certain point, you have to get over it.”

It’s a trade-off that comes with growing success for the prolific North Carolina native, who now writes for the L.A.-based TV show “Switched at Birth” (on the ABC Family network) and is getting more regional productions of her plays.

Those productions include the one of “Widow” that’s now up and running in the Old Globe’s arena-style White Theatre (the show officially opens Thursday).

The humor-laced play centers on Melody (played by Zoë Winters), who finds herself dealing not only with widowhood but the not-so-diplomatic incursions of her mother-in-law, Hope (Christine Estabrook).

“I think Hope has always made her feel she’s not good enough,” Brunstetter says of the fraught dynamic between the two. “And I think Melody is still figuring out who she is. Hope is just one of those people who makes her feel immediately, incredibly insecure. She loses all her confidence, she has no idea how to conduct herself. It turns her into a total weirdo.”

Acting up

The pair’s relationship, and the play’s storyline, actually derive from a whole lot of things that were running through Brunstetter’s head when off-Broadway’s Ars Nova commissioned her to write “Widow” in 2009.

For one, while she had flown many times before, a spate of major crashes around that time “just unlocked this anxiety in me — the realization you’re gonna die, and you don’t have control over that fact, all of those things.”

Also, “at that point in my life I had never been to a funeral before, and I always kind of worried about that. I ended up thinking about that a lot. Some people lose loved ones earlier in life, and that really kind of shapes them and forces them to kind of drop into themselves and grow up.